From what I have observed, scoring early and playing offensively are helpful. Is there anything else in deck building and / or play style that I have missed, short of teching against it? A meat damage deck that relies on either tagging or tracing seems to be near useless, short of including something like Ghost branch that relies on neither.

If tag-me or High-Link decks are around, then trying to tag/trace the runner usually isn’t a good plan. That said, even Tag-Me doesn’t like Closed Accounts or Exchange of Information. Keegan Lane also does work against tag-me. Mr. Stone can also make God of War sad, though you have to protect him. (You might notice these are non-kill Yellow strategies. This is why NBN is always good; they will either Kill you with tags, or win by Tagging you a bunch, or win by fast-advancing their agendas…)

Usually the way to beat High-Link (read: Sunny/Nexus Kate/Citadel Andy) is to simply not play the Trace game.

It would be helpful if you defined the decks you’re talking about. Tag Me and High Link are not often combined, as far as I know. Although both can create a robust DLR-engine, they have different weaknesses.

Scarcity of Resources may be considered a tech card, but it really isn’t, since almost all runners have resources. And, nowadays most Corps want some currents to at least turn off runner currents. The All-Seeing I is a tech card, but it can cripple the tag-me high resource decks (just watch out for Activist Support and Fall Guys).

Some High Link DLR decks that clear tags at the end of the turn, tend to only run AI breakers, so if you have a few anti-AI ice, you can probably close out games before they mill you out.

Having an astronomical amount of credits can be useful too. Against tag-me you may consider trashing their resources. And against tag-clearing high link runners (with Citadel), you could try to beat that trace and take out the important resources next turn. Most, likely they will just slow them down until they amass their own credits or redundant copies of resources. So, you have to also be advancing your win condition while getting those credits, so you can take advantage of them slow slowing down.

As you can see there are different approaches based on what type of runner they are. So, most likely additional advice will depend on knowing the specific deck archetype you’re talking about.

@CrushU, Thanks for the comment! I forgot about Closed Accounts and EOI, and even Pyschographics which @Labbes mentions to deal with tag-me decks. Which leaves High Link I suppose.

@tvaduva, you are right about the two styles being different. I don’t know the name of the arch types, and I am not sure but the runner with the tag me Quetzal deck ran Obelus, Mercs, Account Siphons and any thing that would give her a tag. There was also this card that let’s the runner access X number of cards in a server, where X is the number of tags (It was awesome; she accessed 20 cards or so ).

The Quetzal deck you mention can run out of basically any Anarch (There’s current debate as to which Anarch it’s best out of. It’s unusual in that it’s probably definitely not the best running it using Whizzard.)

The Resource is Counter-Surveillance. Mercs is dangerous to run, I suppose… As the only resource, anyway. If there were a bunch of resources including Wireless Net Pavilion and so forth, I can see that working.

Counter-Surveillance has to match their credits to the number of tags exactly, so you can use that to inform you how soon they will go for the big dig. Mars for Martian does help them a ton, so Closed Accounts is helpful but limited, since they’ll also have to factor in the cost of breaking in. Macrophage is good against God of War. Also traps in R&D like Snares, Shocks, Fetal, and Obokata are really helpful if they do get the big dig off.

DLR Citadel Andy is entirely different. Best way is to go fast, and have anti-AI ice. It can’t really contest econ Assets, so you could also stack 3+ ice in a remote for scoring, and have a bunch of Adonis, and Marilyn, Sundew, etc, undefended to fuel rezzing ice and scoring. There is a point about midway, where they have Citadel, Nexus, and 2-3 Power Taps, where they are getting 4-6 credits per turn for free, so you need to be close to winning by that point. They can usually get through one ice for free with Nexus, but they have to use Mammon for the others, which can get really expensive.

Besides Scarcity to slow them down, you can use the newly released Biased Reporting to fuel going fast against these decks.